Another tragedy that we cannot hide from
by Brendan Coffey
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As the doors on the hearse closed his best friend made for the entrance, not running but walking at an exaggerated pace so that he got there before anyone else.
The silence had gone on so long that even in the strange reflections of a mind dealing with grief and its tragic circumstances, the silence had been broken because of the hanging around. Conversations began in twos, then swelled to threes and fours and before too long the whole place was coughing back laughter and shutting out this mournful silence.
Ruairi’s coffin was parked between the clubhouse and the GAA pitch. He was surrounded by the possibilities of the field and the realities of the people. At 28 there were plenty of realities but never enough. There were too many possibilities to contemplate. You have to vow that you will do your best to live out the possibilities he never did because otherwise this huge gathering, this huge portrayal of collective grief, this instinctive round of applause for a fallen team mate will truly be in vain.
In this place we mean something to the world around us, it’s what gives you comfort when a stag weekend drowning happens out of the blue and logic gives us no answers but a cruel hindsight that makes you curse the very notion of a stag weekend. That is not an answer though because that is not the way the world works. For us, young men, we are only beginning to learn how the world works.
Two and half weeks ago now my club, Maynooth, was visited by the cruel hands of tragedy in the dark moments of a Saturday night. News had travelled across the Irish Sea from Brighton. Ruairi Kelly had drowned. He was on a stag weekend, had got caught up in the currents on the shore and despite the heroic attempts of the other lads with him he was lost to them and swept away by the relentless ocean. Two of the 15 lads who were on the stag hadn’t been down at the beach at 7pm when Ruairi had taken the notion to head into the sea for a bit of craic.
By the time they were running down the beach it was too late and getting perilous for another who had gone to rescue Ruairi. It was his life that hung in the balance now as the waves crashed against him but somehow he managed to summon enough straight to swim out of it. Ruairi’s body was recovered by the lifeboat service, 14 young men stood in shock, some feeling guilty because they hadn’t even been able to get wet in the rescue attempts.
That was when they knew what tragic felt like.
At the back of all this they were supposed to be celebrating the countdown to a friend’s wedding, instead they were mourning a death that happened in the blinking of an eye. This wasn’t surreal, this was hyper real and all the more so because they had phone calls to make and people to inform all the time trying to hold back the news because you couldn’t be 100 per cent certain yet of what had happened.
Back in Maynooth news filtered through shortly after 10 o’clock. The news passed around the pub but almost as quickly as you heard it someone else was nodding in your direction with that “we both know something we rather we didn’t” look that is expressed by half bowed heads and gentle nods.
Some left, some stayed on to drink away the thoughts that this latest news would bring. Ruairi was going to be dead forever, those thoughts could wait until the morning.
Three nights before this Ruairi had enjoyed hurling training in the club and sat at the bar afterwards to announce it was his birthday the following day. The hoor was always smiling but then he was always deadly serious when he was playing. That was what made him a little bit special. He was at the centre of our hurling team.
“Everyone has a Ruairi story, don’t they,” said Fagan leaving the funeral mass on Saturday morning. He was right and it was that we laughed about as much as the stories we told.
The Wednesday after the drowning we gathered in the clubhouse for a mass, it was the only way we knew how to deal with it. There needed to be a focal point for us because on Friday some of us were in the church again for the month’s mind to mark the death of another team mate. He died by suicide, just 26. He was the third young man that was once connected to the club who had committed suicide inside the last 12 months.
“This has to be it, there can’t be anymore surely,” another friend said desperately the night of the last funeral.
He was there again for this one and he had been the one to share a room with Ruairi on the stag weekend.
We all want to shout stop, to somehow pause life but we know we can’t. All we can do is gather because the toughest part of life is knowing that you sit further up in church the sadder the occasion. There is comfort in being down the back but what you can’t forget is that you sit further up for the really happy occasions too.
Sometimes we’ll walk, sometimes we’ll run and sometimes we’ll move at that exaggerated walking pace because we need to get there first. What Ruairi’s thought us is that we’ll never hide no matter what we do.
